The Art of Concentration Session 2 Rerun: Lesson 1

Hello Everyone

After a week of reviewing our practice of settling the bases and re-establishing awareness, this week we are going to start our adventure meditating upon the body. Since our focus on this course is concentration rather than the healing effects of meditation we will not start out exploring the body’s anatomical systems as we do in our healing meditation course. Instead we will see the body as a rich and fertile ground in which to train the various subtle aspects and nuances to our concentration practice that will make up the majority of this term’s work. That said, your deepening capacity for concentration will inevitably increase the healing effects of your meditation.

It is really my aspiration to help you to become truly accomplished meditators who can genuinely concentrate. And I can tell you that from the 25 years of experience teaching that this is something much more rare than it is assumed. I have met many people who have been trained in concentration but few who actually reached genuine states of deep absorption, even though they might have assumed they had. I have found this area of practice to be so poorly taught in general, and mostly it is done by rote from some of the classic texts, and in a way that lacks the subtle guidance and pointing out that is required to get beyond the common state of what I would call, doing it by ‘ticking boxes’.

The formulaic method explained in the Visuddhimagga for example, though excellent in many ways is commonly followed without any real pointing out of how to properly develop the subtle states and mental factors that actually open the door to deep absorption. I will discuss this in more detail as we go. It is not that the texts are incorrect – of course they are not. It is more that the explanation and commentary of the experiential stages that make up the pathway into concentration are so briefly explained, and some of the modern assumptions about them seem often to be lacking. I even remember when I was studying and practicing in the monastery many years ago, many monks and yogis would get very frustrated by their lack of progress and many others would complain that the states they did manage to attain were often easily lost as soon as they eased off in the intensity of their practice. The reason for this is because the wilful effort was often excessive and there was not enough work done towards building a mind that is inclined towards concentration by nature. This is one of the reasons we are working so hard to overcome the hindrances to concentration, and train in detail and in various ways the supporting factors of mind that are required. And so from here on we will be really drilling down on each of the key building blocks that are required to genuinely establish stable, deep, subtle and sustained concentration.

I sincerely hope that you will put the time into your efforts to work at your practice. Unlike some of the pointing out instructions which work more to correct attitude or understanding, here it really is a case that these habits need to be deeply embedded into the mind so that they stick. We have to be able to do all of the preliminary practices almost effortlessly so that the states they point towards come about habitually. Why? Because if we are having to make great effort to settle the mind in one point we will never enter into the effortless state of absorption that we are working towards. And ‘trying too hard to do it’ is one of the reasons many not only fail but frustrate and exhaust themselves trying. In fact overexertion is just as much a hindrance to progress as is lack of appropriate effort.

That said, in this weeks meditation I am simply going to give you basic guidance to steer you in an organised way through the body. I want you to get used to the transition away from the breath into the body, and to get comfortable there before fine tuning your practice. Also it will be interesting to see how your previous work from term one sticks with you and is carried away from our initial object ( the breath ) to our next series of objects ( the various aspects of the body). You will be given very simple instructions to avert your attention to various parts of the body and a short period of time to establish concentration and settle upon them. The average period of time in one place at this stage will rarely be more than a minute. But at this level of practice a lot can happen in a short period of time if we are skilful in what we are doing; our focus is upon precision of application and dexterity as we go on to further refine the positive qualities and mental energies that are so often hijacked by our modern approach to life with is fragmented capacity of attention and focus.

So please give yourself a week of just working through this meditation every day to get comfortable being back meditating in the body and also to overcome the obvious first hurdle which is the tendency to continue to pay attention to the breath while concentrating in the body….because this is by definition split attention and so of course opposes one pointedness; a big focus of this terms work.

This stage of the practice is truly wonderful for the many and varied benefits it brings as you will discover as you go. See it as a voyage of discovery, not just into your body but into the subtle nuances of building a strong concentration practice.

I hope you enjoy your meditation this week

with metta

Burgs.